Special Counsel John Durham, the longtime federal prosecutor tasked with investigating the origins of the FBI’s probe into the relationship between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian Federation, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
The press hurriedly took a victory lap on behalf of committee Democrats and their adversarial approach to the witness.
“Dems go off on ‘partisan hack’ John Durham at hearing,” blared Salon. “Top Democrat Shreds GOP Goon John Durham’s BS In Wednesday Hearing,” shrieked Bipartisan Report’s delighted headline about Ranking Member Jerry Nadler’s (D-NY) performance.
Some even found themselves falling in love all over again with Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who promised but never delivered evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. “Adam Schiff dismantles John Durham” exclaimed Raw Story.
But for those familiar with Durham’s task and the report he produced, these tales of Democratic triumphalism are dubious. Democrats didn’t debunk the Durham report on Wednesday, they distracted from it using three arguments only tangentially related to Durham’s actual claims.
First, Democrats argued that the dearth of criminal convictions secured by Durham served as evidence that there was no misconduct or mistakes made at the Department of Justice. It is true that although Durham brought three cases to trial, only one of the three defendants — Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer who altered a document to erroneously indicate that Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page was not a source for the CIA — was convicted. However, that is hardly a positive reflection on the FBI.
Michael Sussmann, an ex-FBI lawyer who was working for the Clinton campaign, brought what he alleged to be evidence of a communication link between Trump Tower and a Russian financial institution called Alfa Bank. Sussmann used his connections to introduce the evidence directly to his friend, then-FBI general counsel James Baker, whom he told in a September 18, 2016 text message he was producing the evidence “on my own— not on behalf of a client or company” because he wanted “to help the Bureau.” In reality, Sussmann was billing the time he spent working on Alfa Bank allegations to the Clinton campaign. For some perspective on how intertwined the alleged Trump-Alfa connection was with the campaign, consider that Hillary Clinton later personally authorized the leaking of the allegations to the press.
Sussmann was acquitted of lying to the FBI because the prosecution did not find the text until it was too late to charge him. Instead, they charged him for lying about the same topic during his meeting with Baker the next day, but their case was mostly based on Baker’s word, and he faltered on the witness stand.
In any case, information revealed at trial pointed toward bias at the bureau. Scott Hellman, among the first of the agents to review the evidence Sussmann produced, testified that the underlying data did not comport with the conclusions offered, leading him to wonder if whoever had made them had a “mental disability.” FBI leadership nevertheless demonstrated rank disregard for the evaluation of their own experts. According to the agent in charge of the Trump-Russia probe, they were “fired up” over the bunk Alfa Bank allegations and pressured him into opening up a full investigation into them. “We must do it,” he wrote to an underling after conversations with brass.
The devil in the details demonstrates that the Sussmann acquittal was hardly the exoneration of the DOJ that Nadler and his colleagues painted it as. Trials are geared toward proving the wrongdoing of an individual, and although Sussmann got off thanks to a prosecutorial mistake, his trial did little to disprove the underlying claims against him or the FBI.
Second, Democrats brought up evidence of the Trump campaign acting in an unscrupulous, inadvisable manner in an effort to overshadow mistakes made at the bureau. “Mr. Durham, you are totally oblivious to Donald Trump’s use of the stolen emails on the campaign trail more than 100 times?” asked Schiff on Wednesday.
Of course, there is little doubt that the Trump campaign would have leapt at any and all opportunities to release damaging information on their opponent. A June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer is evidence of a willingness to speak with unsavory sources in an effort to secure dirt on Clinton. The candidate’s public urging of Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails is evidence of a prioritization of his political interests over the country’s.
But by themselves, they do nothing to dispel the notion that bias and misconduct plagued Crossfire Hurricane, the name of the investigation into the Trump-Russia connection. It is obviously true that both the target of an investigation and the investigators themselves may have behave improperly. The former does not disprove the latter.
Third, Democrats attributed partisan motives and outlandish theories to Durham that he did not have or posit. Nadler described Durham’s mission as one to prove a “deep state conspiracy,” which he called a “fantasy” of “MAGA Republicans.”
That’s neither how Durham saw his task nor what he described in his report. The FBI opened an investigation into Trump based on misguided suspicion of Page (again, a source for the CIA) and a report from Australian diplomats that a low-level campaign aide named George Papadopoulos had heard that “the Clintons had ‘a lot of baggage'” and “suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Mrs. Clinton.”
This suggestion of a suggestion spurred then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe — always a reliable ally of the Clintons — to order anti-Trump agent Peter Strzok to buck good sense and open a full investigation into Trump instead of following protocol and conducting an assessment, and preliminary inquiry to see if such an investigation was necessary.
The bureau failed to verify the information in the comically false dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, instead citing the unverified and outrageous allegations in surveillance applications. Later, the primary source for the dossier, Igor Danchenko, informed the FBI that Steele had misstated and/or exaggerated allegations against Trump. Still, the bureau continued to cite the dossier in applications.
Durham concluded that the FBI did not have “any actual evidence of collusion” between Trump and Russia when it began Crossfire Hurricane. He accused FBI leadership of a “serious lack of analytical rigor” and of leaning on “investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents.” Can anyone honestly deny that this is the case? Upon further reflection, did Democrats even try to on Wednesday?
One need not sympathize with Donald Trump’s politics or even approve the behavior of his 2016 campaign vis-à-vis Russia to understand that Durham’s investigation exposed rot at a powerful law enforcement agency with the ability to surveil and jail Americans. An FBI that is easily manipulated by political actors and prone to cutting corners should be a major concern to elected officials of any partisan allegiance.
Instead of using the opportunity before them to unravel what went wrong at the FBI in 2016, though, Democrats used a slew of thinly veiled diversionary tactics to score cheap points. They conflated the criminal cases Durham brought against individuals with the larger argument he made about the bureau. They conflated an acknowledgment of Durham’s findings with a defense of Trump’s character. And they falsely projected the motives and assertions of Trump’s biggest fans onto Durham.
Unfortunately for those with a genuine interest in good governance and the provision of equal justice under the law, this proved an effective strategy when married with the media’s unseemly cheerleading.
That the Democratic Party finds itself outraged not by misconduct at the FBI, but by the disclosure of that misconduct to the public, is a scandal in and of itself.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
